Cultivate the habit of thinking ahead, and of anticipating the necessary and immediate consequences of all your actions.... Likewi...se in your pleasures, ask yourself what such and such an amusement leads to, as it is essential to have an objective in everything you do. Any pastime that contributes nothing to bodily strength or to mental alertness is a totally ridiculous, not to say, idiotic, pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In chess we find several quite crisp distinctions that can also be discerned rather more problematically in the larger game of lif...e. There are, for instance, the "forced moves" in chess. Moves are occasionally forced by the rules of chess: in these instances one finds oneself so boxed in that one and only one legal move is available.... More interesting ... are the forced moves on those occasions when there is more than one legal move, but only one non-idiotic, non-"suicidal" move, which is said for that reason to be forced. It is forced not by the rules of chess, and not by the laws of physics, but by the dictates of reason. It is obviously the only rational thing to do, given one's interest in winning (or just not losing) the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[Catholicism] offers a much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is s...o indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of "childlike",--innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other--their centres of emotional energy are too different.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

And what was the theory at the bottom of all these astounding proceedings? So far as it can be reduced to comprehensible terms it ...was much less a theory than a fear--a shivering, idiotic, discreditable fear of a mere banshee--an overpowering, paralyzing dread that some extra-eloquent Red, permitted to emit his balderdash unwhipped, might eventually convert a couple of courageous men, and that the courageous men, filled with indignation against the plutocracy, might take to the highroad, burn down a nail-factory or two, and slit the throat of some virtuous profiteer. In order to lay his fear, in order to ease the jangled nerves of the American successors to the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, all the constitutional guarantees of the citizen were suspended, the statute-books were burdened with laws that surpass anything heard of in the Austria of Maria Theresa, the country was handed over to a frenzied mob of detectives, informers and agents provocateursand the Reds departed laughing loudly, and were hailed by the Bolsheviki as innocents escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Do you really want to know who I think started the war?... Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough t...o blow themselves off the face of the earth?... The trouble with you is you want a simple answer and there isn't any. The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb and counter-bombs and counter- counter-bombs. The devices outgrew us, we couldn't control them. I know. I helped build them, God help me. Some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something, knew that if he hesitated one thousandth of a second his own country would be wiped off the map, so, so he pushed a button. And, and the world went crazy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Only in America ... do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins... Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles--and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech--look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the po...or on earth; as for me,$I am on the side of men and I will not leave it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »